The Q’s Got Mobile Moves

We all know that mobile use is on the rise, and has been for some time – no surprise here. In fact, it’s more than likely that you’re reading these words as you walk, eyes glued to your phone’s screen. And if so, please take a second to look up now – just in case. What is surprising, however, is that there are many companies out there not allocating nearly enough resources to mobile, especially when buying programmatically. What gives?

Perhaps it’s that some are still associating programmatic with desktop initiatives only, or maybe it’s the habitual fear of the unknown, such as the creative and attribution challenges between mobile web and mobile in-app. Whatever the reason, it’s imperative to spend your ad dollars wisely without missing out on the given: mobile, or where your eyes are looking.

“2015 was the year of mobile really took off for us,” said Eric Leist, Director of Mobile Platform. “We expanded into mobile in-app media, mobile video, and even rolled out a product that tracks consumer behavior at retail stores and attributes it to digital media campaigns.”

Here’s a quick overview of what took place on the mobile front at the Q…

To begin, total impressions delivered on our platform grew 3X in 2015. That’s impressive! But not nearly as impressive as our 20X growth in mobile. Yep. You read that correctly. For comparison, consider that in January 2015 the Q delivered 1 billion impressions via desktop or laptop computers and 35 million on mobile. While this December we delivered over 700 million impressions via mobile devices. In other words, the share of impressions the Q delivered on mobile devices grew in 2015 from 3% in January to 23%. And on a few recent days we delivered 30% of all ad impressions via mobile.

What’s next?

While we likely won’t see another 20X jump in 2016, mobile growth will continue to outpace all other channels and drive an increasingly larger share of advertising budgets. As this chart shows desktop usage is not decreasing, it’s just not growing as fast as mobile: